Bark On, the debut novel by Mason Boyles, follows Ezra Fogerty, an aspiring professional triathlete training out of his ma’s trailer in the eroding North Carolina beach town of Kure. When the recently disgraced celebrity coach Benji Newton shows up at his doorstep offering to train him for the Chapel Hill Ironman, Ezra accepts eagerly.
Benji’s methods prove brutal and ritualistic, and seem connected to Kure’s abruptly climbing coyote population. As Ezra begins to question the logic behind his preparation, Benji invites the orphaned prodigy Casper Swayze to train with them. The diminutive Casper one-ups Ezra in every workout until suffering a disastrous injury that coincides with Benji’s disappearance, leaving Ezra to choose between caring for Casper and completing preparations for the biggest race of his career.
Bark On will be published by Driftwood Press on February 28, 2023. Below is an exclusive excerpt from the book’s opening pages:
Benji ties them to the truck. Runs ropes from the hitch to their waists and starts driving. Casper and Ezra chase it up Bromine Avenue, a leash each, the pickup iced to cruise control at twelve miles per hour. They turn north toward the main drag of Kure. Sunrise congeals the boardwalk, clotting around storm-shuttered condos and the dormant Tilt-a-Whirl and the rickety ferris wheel like amber preserving the bones of a beached sea beast. Late July and the island’s already fossilized. Benji beams the truck along Ocean Street. Woody Hewett Bridge vaults over the inlet. Ezra starts to fall back as they climb. He gives it his finishing kick, but his rope tightens. His torso goes acute with the grade.
Casper’s talking, a sure sign he’s hurting. His head tips toward his left shoulder. “Giddy up, Robo…Cop. Let’s…stroll.”
Ezra’s already sprinting. Traffic snorts past in the left lane. Casper swings wide amid brakes and honks and accelerates. How floral the kid looks in the truck’s sideview, stem-thin through the torso, his buzzed head branched with veins. Ezra’s a crumbling boulder behind him. Striations fissure his thighs with each footstrike. Training and hunger have weathered the muscle from his broader bones. Doesn’t bedrock break down into soil? Casper’s growing ahead of him, Ezra thinks, his lead nourished as Ezra erodes.
Casper catches up to the driver’s side, the wind smearing his scream. “Where’s the beef?”
Benji taps his sideview, where Ezra sees himself reflected. He keeps his face plastic, breaths rounding out from his cheekbones like beads off an abacus; somewhere inside, him a score’s shifting. One more for Casper’s bank. The kid’s been beating him for so long that it actually calms him when the kid does the inevitable and pulls away.
Ezra’s rope jerks taut and he sprawls, bellyflopping on the blacktop. He sleds along on his stomach. The pickup brakes.
Benji oozes out of the driver’s side like he’s melting. The seeping scent of him—that stale, manufactured smell, like turning meat and cheap sunscreen. His legs spill onto the asphalt. He’s wearing Ezra’s flip-flops; his heels squelch off the insoles as he approaches. That ankleless gait, like his Achilles tendons are the only solid part of him. The lenses of his Oakleys mirror them in chrome-tinted miniature: Ezra aching to his feet, Casper jogging in place. It’s as if Benji isn’t just looking at them, but rather staring them into existence. Ezra almost says something—sorry?—but Benji speaks first. “Get him next time.”
Next time could be anytime. Benji never warns them; wants them guts-first, he says. Leave your brain in your helmet. Ezra and Casper eat when they’re told. They sprint when instructed. They sleep on command, ontologically, on the boat cabin’s sport carpet or the track or even between laps in the pool, chins fish-hooked over lane lines. They doze until Benji shakes them out of it. He feels braille from their pulses, reads fatigue at a touch and plots workouts from there. It all hinges on his What the Hell Principle: Benji pushes them until Ezra pauses, asks, “what the hell?”
When Casper first got here, he’d ask that, too. But lately the kid only laughs. His taunts tow Ezra forward. That’s the real rope.
They fumigate in the truck bed on the drive back to Kure. Casper’s dozing, head pillowed on the tire well. Ezra picks gravel from his ripening knees. He bruises easier lately, like the hours of panting have hollowed him from within. It’s all lung in there. He needs as much space for oxygen as he can get.
The truck hooks onto Bromine Avenue. Every block inland’s another dropped tax bracket. Duplexes surrender to bungalows, trailers. Asphalt digresses to gravel. The road stubs into an ashtray of a cul-de-sac. The bones of the Dow chemical plant a click to its southwest, through a waft of pines thin as smoke. The woods are crosshatched with trenches and parched vats that sieved bromine from seawater. That alchemy spoiled the water table a decade ago, then the real estate market. A popup camper and trailered sport boat are the only lot no longer vacant on that cul-de-sac, sitting south pole to the turnout. Both belong to Ezra’s Ma, who’s riding her bike the longest way across Canada. His rent is monthly spongedowns of the Not That Fogerty. His new roommates aren’t on the lease. Benji’s an honored guest, but Ma’d left before Casper showed, the Canada crossing the last death-defying item on her kick-the-bucket list. She was going to ride out and back, sleep in the van, then drive up to her turnaround point the next morning. A yearlong trip she’d been putting off for a decade. As soon as Ezra’d left for college. As soon as he got his pro card. But this had been the year she was really doing it. Ezra was twenty-five. He could fend.
When Benji’d claimed Ezra needed to cocoon in the training last Thanksgiving she’d already been packing. She’d left the same evening, burping stuffing; Casper’d shown up the first day of December. She doesn’t know about her latest tenant. She doesn’t know Benji’s got all three of them sleeping in the boat. They pee right off of the deck, trying to ripple the ditch with their streams. Benji calls that casting a line. They don’t have to live like this—Ezra doesn’t—but it’s all Benji’s call, the boat, everything. He claims that they need to exist egregiously. One more task Casper’s beating Ezra in.
The kid naps in the back of the truck, his square head bouncing off the wheel bed with every pothole they bounce over. Benji seems to be swerving to catch them. Casper won’t stir until the man says—not even for his own screams.
Benji spills out of the truck now, preambling. “Overload, tootsies. Got to shut off your off-buttons.”
The Piston. Ezra punches his quivering legs.
A medieval torture system of a thing. Benji’s dungeon-mastered it together by welding a brakeless bike to a wind trainer. The ergometer’s mounted backwards, chocked in front of the back wheel so it spins in reverse. Since the bike’s rigged fixie, the pedals spin backwards with it. You have to produce an equal-and-opposite force to keep your legs from following. It’s been a fallow threat for two weeks now, corroding outside—accumulating rust for extra resistance, maybe.
Benji drags an extension cord out the backdoor of the camper, still talking. “Goal’s desensitizing.” Meaning neurons: how they short-circuit contractions when muscle tension’s too high. He plugs in the wind trainer and gives the saddle a coital slap. “It’s this or a knife to your Golgi tendons.”
This is Ezra’s Next Time. But Casper’s bounding forward, already mounting the bike.
The shoes are clipped to the pedals. Benji seals them with duct-tape when Casper slides his feet in. Benji toes the wind trainer’s switch and the flywheel starts up with a soldering hum. Casper huffs out of the saddle to pedal against it.
“Sit,” Benji says.
Casper settles. He props his elbows on the handlebars, panting, obedient.
There’s no timer—with Benji, there’s never one—but Ezra counts. Thirty seconds. A minute. Benji moves in front of the Piston. The way Casper watches him—a stare like a sponge. The kid’s grinding his teeth again. The ergometer parrots him, serrating its pitch. Two minutes.
Casper’s head goes diagonal. His inhales make sine curves from his ribs.
“Slow,” Benji says, slicking his palms over the kid’s scalp. “Water,” Benji says, and Ezra understands this is directed at him. He grabs a gallon jug from the boat, peels the cap, sneaks a swig. The water’s melty with plastic. He brings it to Benji, who spits his bitten cuticle into it. He adds a pinch of the humus he keeps buried in his pocket—a proprietary crumble of bark and leaves—and swills it, lifting the jug to Casper’s lips. Casper slurps until he pulls it away.
The flywheel’s hum frays an octave. Benji swats at the noise, chewing a wisp of his mullet like a bit. Sparks shrapnel off the ergometer. Then the hum shatters; the flywheel whirs silent, and Casper’s cadence speeds, his legs blurring as he pedals.
Benji turns to Ezra, distancing his eyebrows from the tops of his Oakleys. “Mama’s missing an off-button. That’s how RoboCops should be.”
Should it irk Ezra that this doesn’t irk him? He’s just glad the Piston busted before he had to climb on and slog. He starts clapping.
Benji cuts the cord and ravels it back into the camper. When he’s gone, Casper coasts to a stop. Ezra peels the duct tape off Casper’s left shoe and sees blood smutching the back it. The kid’s heel is gushing.
Casper bares his flat molars at Ezra. “Want a lick?”
“Goggles!” Benji hollers, banging back out of the camper.
The kid rushes into a crouch as he reemerges. Hiding the heel.
“You hurt him,” Ezra says, more for the sake of his own pain—goggles means they’re going to swim.
Casper crab-walks away when Benji grunts down beside him.
“Lemme see,” Benji says. Instead sniffs.
Casper sags still, obedient. Benji slides his hands around the heel in a probing way that makes Ezra think the guy’s eyes are shut behind his sunglasses. Ezra pictures him blind. Pictures empty sockets. Casper shudders. Benji lowers his ear to the ground beside the kid’s foot. He presses his mouth to the wound and hums into it. Ezra thinks he hears words in the tune, but the din of the flies saws off whatever syllables Benji might be singing. Benji’s lips twitch. Then he takes a wet suck. Casper’s eyes suction shut.
“You’re shitting,” Ezra says.
Casper grins. “You can’t hurt like me.”
